


Learning to be Whole

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [43]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 06:45:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14764619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: Toast visits the Dag in her aerie.





	Learning to be Whole

“It’s like…” the Dag trailed off, touched the spined leaf of a lettuce. She didn’t look at Toast, who had come for Annie’s salve and was instead getting a lecture on the nature of the universe.

Tarl was cleaning between his claws, picking at rocks and dirt with his teeth. Pheona hopped up onto a table and started inspecting seedlings, one ear tilted towards her human.

“It’s like all the things I don’t know are pressed inside my head,” the Dag continued, and Toast watched her fingers cascade around a can of water, tattoos flashing like cast runes in the filtered sunlight. “Like when I learn something it’s not learning, it’s _unlocking_. I knew all these things already; that seedlings grow faster if you sing to them, that roots grow deeper in loose soil. That rocks can sing in the wind.”

“Do those things help? Does knowing them change who you are?” Tarl asked unexpectedly. Toast looked at him, wondering. They’d had a bad night. Her hair was getting long again, but she didn’t know who to trust to hold the shears. And her hands had started to shake when she picked them up, her eyes full of rancid darkness and her mouth dry with remembered thirst. Tarl spoke now, and she felt in him a desire… not to forget, though that idea had been in the back of her mind more than once. It was a longing for this unlocking, a knowing that would not erase what Joe had done to them, but that would make those memories not _all_ they were. To fill her mind with singing rocks and growing things and her sister’s silver wisdom, soft as moonlight.

The Dag crouched down on her heels, looking at the badger daemon with a solemnity that was echoed by Pheona, black eyes fixed on Toast and ears pricked forward. “Sometimes it does,” she said. “Sometimes we learn something, and the world breaks apart. We have to put it back together with this new idea, and everything looks different.”

“Not necessarily better,” Pheona cautioned from her tabletop. “Just different.”

Toast swallowed her words and refused to look away, caught the fox’s eyes and wouldn’t blink.

“We’re building ourselves out of ruins,” the Dag said, standing up and brushing dirt from her heavy pants, full of tools and scrap and dirt and seeds. “I know there’s going to be fallout.” She glanced up at Toast with wisps of her hair falling like smoke across her face. “We don’t have to let it poison us.”

“I need to cut my hair.” Toast said, louder than she needed to because it was the only way she would be able to say it. More quietly, as her fear-bright words faded, she added, “I can’t do it myself.” She felt stronger for saying it, and that was strange too. Like it had been Joe’s ghost that kept her pinned within a prison of her own mind, and just the act of throwing open the door was enough to crush him again. To see his bloody half-face and jam her foot on the gas pedal.

The Dag smiled her sideways smile and put the can of water into her sister’s hand. “You help water these flax seedlings, and I’ll even clean my scissors,” she said, and Toast snorted.

 


End file.
